ISCA 2018 Experiments

This page contains descriptions of the experiments in our ISCA 2018 paper and instructions for reproducing them on your own simulations.

One important difference between the configuration used in the ISCA 2018 paper and the open-source release of FireSim is that the ISCA paper used a proprietary L2 cache design that is not open-source. Instead, the open-source FireSim uses an LLC model that models the behavior of having an L2 cache as part of the memory model. Even with the LLC model, you should be able to see the same trends in these experiments, but exact numbers may vary.

Each section below describes the resources necessary to run the experiment. Some of these experiments require a large number of instances – you should make sure you understand the resource requirements before you run one of the scripts.

Compatiblity: These were last tested with commit 4769e5d86acf6a9508d2b5a63141dc80a6ef20a6 (Oct. 2019) of FireSim. After this commit, the Linux version in FireSim has been bumped past Linux 4.15. To reproduce workloads that rely on OS behavior that has changed, like memcached-thread-imbalance, you must use the last tested Oct. 2019 commit.

Prerequisites

These guides assume that you have previously followed the single-node/cluster-scale experiment guides in the FireSim documentation. Note that these are advanced experiments, not introductory tutorials.

Building Benchmark Binaries/Rootfses

We include scripts to automatically build all of the benchmark rootfs images that will be used below. To build them, make sure you have already run ./marshal build workloads/br-base.json in firesim/sw/firesim-software, then run:

cd firesim/deploy/workloads/
make allpaper

Figure 6: Network Bandwidth Saturation

Resource requirements:

f1_16xlarges=2
m4_16xlarges=1
f1_2xlarges=0

To Run:

cd firesim/deploy/workloads/
./run-bw-test.sh withlaunch

Figure 7: Memcached QoS / Thread Imbalance

Resource requirements:

f1_16xlarges=3
m4_16xlarges=0
f1_2xlarges=0

To Run:

cd firesim/deploy/workloads/
./run-memcached-thread-imbalance.sh withlaunch

Figure 8: Simulation Rate vs. Scale

Resource requirements:

f1_16xlarges=32
m4_16xlarges=5
f1_2xlarges=0

To Run:

cd firesim/deploy/workloads/
./run-simperf-test-scale.sh withlaunch

A similar benchmark is also provided for supernode mode, see run-simperf-test-scale-supernode.sh.

Running all experiments at once

This script simply executes all of the above scripts in parallel. One caveat is that the bw-test script currently cannot run in parallel with the others, since it requires patching the switches. This will be resolved in a future release.

cd firesim/deploy/workloads/
./run-all.sh